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How to Use Visual Cues to Guide Your Customers

Every website has visual cues which, if done properly, guide customers on a seamless and enjoyable journey. You can think of visual cues as landmarks or signpost that clearly present a website’s structure and content. Without them, visitors lose interest in a website, and move onto one that clearly shows them what to do and where to go.

Essentially, a good website really needs to direct customers so that they know where to look, what to click on, and hopefully, how to make a purchase.

Here a few ways you can introduce clear visual clues to your website:

Literally point them in the right direction

This may sound obvious, but this is a tried and test method that hasn’t been overdone. Arrows and lines are very good at telling your customers where to direct their eyes to next, such as a call to action like a sign-up form. Arrows with some text are also useful for highlighting important features or benefits of your products or services, without overwhelming your readers’ eyes (and brains!)

Use color to emphasize and differentiate

Color is probably one of the best-known and widely used strategies for drawing attention to an element on a website, but this doesn’t mean that it’s any less effective. To emphasize call to action buttons, ensure that its color contrasts with the other elements on the page. Kiss-metrics have put together this handy info graphic (check it out here https://blog.kissmetrics.com/color-psychology/?wide=1) that lays out which colors convey certain emotions, and how they affect purchase decisions. It’s based on North American consumer behavior, but nevertheless it demonstrates that there are strong links between color and emotion. For example, they found that red conveys feelings of energy and urgency, and is therefore most often used for clearance sales. Blue, on the other hand, creates a sensation of trust and security, so companies like banks tend to use a blue color palette in their web designs.

Use imperatives in your content

Imperatives are verbs which give an order when used in a sentence. Look to Facebook. It’s very clear what they’re telling us to do – Comment, Like or Share. Do the same on your website. Be explicit in your instructions. At the bottom of your blog, write “continue reading” or “read more” and be direct in telling your visitors to follow you on social media. This has been found to yield much higher conversion rates.

Whitespace works, too

While some web designers are reluctant to use whitespace, it’s very powerful for drawing attention to call to action buttons. The trick is not to overdo it, otherwise it can look unrelated to the content on your page, and might confuse your customers.

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